VARIATION THEORY: A VIEW FROM CREOLE CONTINUA

Abstract

Practictioners of the area of linguistic investigation referred to as “quantitative” or “variacionist” sociolinguistics genereally see their as being to uncover mid account for the systematicity underlying veriation in speech behaviour. To this end, the have employed a variety of methods as well as analytic models aimed at incorporating variablility into linguistic description. Among the approaches are Labov’s variable rule’ model, and Bickerton’s “implicational” model. The present papar examines the relevance of these models of variation to Caribbean English creole continua and concludes that neither is well suited to providing a satisfactory account of the sociolinguistic heterogeneity characteristic of such situations. Like other speech communities, Caribbean creole continua manifest patterns of social and stylistic diffrerentiation of linguistic choices. But, unlike typical dialect situations, they display slzarp internal differences in linguistic repertoires and relationships which cannot be subsumed under a single grammar. The failure of variationist theory to adequately describe the orderly heterogeneity of such continuo has to do first, with the architecture of the proposed models, and second, with its tendency to treat sociolinguistic phenomena as though they could be translated directly into grammars, because of this, the social correlates of variation have tended to play a subordinate role to the main goal of variation theory, which is to construct grammars. The result is that many descriptions of variation play only in service to social explanation, or are indeed a-social in character. As long as variation theory continues to see its main objective as being to incorporate variability into current models of grammar, its contribution to a unified theory of a imbrication of language and socio-cultural organization will remain limited.